In keeping with our original mission statement, we have
undertaken steps to help educate the general public about Aleutian's Disease
Virus, in hopes that our efforts will help prevent the spread of the disease. As
we are doing this, we hope to help ADV+ households cope with the illness. We
wish to expand our existing foster home network to include ADV+ homes, to foster
ADV+ ferrets.

We are working on a series of pamphlets, that are for
everyone, to help understand the disease. These are listed below, and require
adobe acrobat to view:.

We also have available a packet of information that you can
give to your vet. The cost for this (to cover copying and binding) is $5.00 plus
postage. Please
e-mail
us if you are interested in this information.

Occurrences of ADV appear to be on the rise in our area,
and we only have one ADV shelter, which is currently full to capacity. ADV+
households are desperately needed to help alleviate the shelter's load. There
are so many healthy, loveable ADV+ ferrets that need a place to go. More
rescues are coming in every day, and we would like to help find safe places for
them to go.

We realize that this will take time, but Metro Ferret is
willing to keep trying to find other ADV+ households that are willing
to foster or adopt ADV+ or ADV- exposed ferrets. If you are one of
those homes, you can click
here to complete an application to foster an ADV+ shelter ferret. Anyone who
is interested in helping our efforts are urged to
contact us:

In the near future, we will be holding meetings in New York
and New Jersey for ADV+ ferret owners, to talk about the disease, and what we
can do to take positive steps towards helping the ferret community with this
problem. Once we have built up a network, we will try to take further steps to
better the situations for ADV+ ferrets.

There are so many things to do, and this is a large and
difficult undertaking, but we feel that this is a very positive step in the
right direction. Even with minimal success, we hope that our endeavor will
become a role model for other ferret groups in the United States.